10/17/2009

The wife is camping with my daughter, and my son is in bed. I don’t feel like reading or working right now.

The usual instructions: You see the chat window below? Look at the bottom. Enter your name or pseudonym in the top window. Enter your comment in the second window, and hit send. I will have to approve your comment before it appears, but I’m online right now, and will approve most comments within a minute. Usually within seconds.

IMPORTANT: Note the buttons at the bottom. You will probably want to turn off “autoscroll.” It bothers a lot of people.

CNS News reports Obama Science Czar John Holdren once advocated America and other nations should force TV and radio stations to promote population control and environmental issues:

“The FCC might be empowered to require that networks donate time for ads to awaken people to the population-resource-environment crisis,” the authors [of Ecoscience, John P. Holdren and Paul and Anne Ehrlich] wrote. “Such spots, sponsored by voluntary organizations like Planned Parenthood, ZPG, and the Sierra Club, have been moderately effective in drawing public attention to the problems. Unfortunately, the advertising budgets available to these groups are puny compared to those of General Motors or Exxon.”

Holdren is President Barack Obama’s top adviser on public policy issues pertaining to science and technology. At the time Ecoscience was published, he was an associate professor of energy and resources at the University of California-Berkeley.

The passage about using the FCC to force broadcasters to air advertisements about “the population-resource-environment crisis” is in a chapter of Ecoscience entitled, “Changing American Institutions.” One of the subheadings in this chapter is “Programming and propaganda.”

The authors argue for state-sponsored propaganda presented as entertainment:

“Much programming ought to be informational, even if presented as entertainment,” wrote Holdren, Ehrlich and Enrlich. “People in the LDCs [less developed countries] need help in increasing agricultural production and improving public health, as well as information on the need for population control and the ways it may be achieved.”

“Programming should be carefully designed by social scientists and communications experts thoroughly familiar with the needs and attitudes of the audiences in each country or locality,” they wrote. “This is particularly important in LDCs, where it will be especially difficult because of the lack of trained people and the radical change in attitude that is required. Control of the communications media obviously should be public, with maximum safeguard against abuses and against the problems of ‘cultural homogenization.’ The problem of controlling ‘Big Brother’ will be ever present in all societies.”

The Larimer County, Colorado, Sheriff’s office interviewed the parents of 6-year-old Falcon Henne, the flying saucer balloon boy, for several hours today and then announced it is preparing search warrants and charges in the case.

Meanwhile, Gawker claims Henne discussed with a former assistant a plan to manufacture a UFO controversy to gain publicity for Henne’s ideas. The assistant also claimed Heene’s attic is “too small and difficult to access for a small child to hide in without assistance” and that “Falcon was the most social, and that those kids never got disciplined” so Falcon’s story that he ran away after being disciplined is not credible. But keep in mind that Gawker acknowledged it compensated the assistant for his story.

Obama followers found it easy to remember the words “Yes, We Can.” Roger Kimball’s words aren’t as easy to remember but they are equally compelling. After considering White House Communications Director Anita Dunn’s willingness to not only quote but endorse the words of Mao Tse-Tung, Kimball said:

“What the left-wing excuse factory wants is for the American people to overlook the radicalism of the people populating Obama’s inner circle, of which Anita Dunn is a prominent member. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me once again remind readers of what Obama promised in his campaign. I don’t mean the long string of broken promises about helping the middle class, pulling out troops from Iraq, prosecuting the war in Afghanistan with vigor, etc. Those were just campaign promises, i.e., vote-getting expedients that events have led Obama to renege on.

No, I mean the one big promise that he has every intention of fulfilling: the promise to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” That is what Obama and his lieutenants are about. They are egalitarians — not, perhaps, quite so radical as Chairman Mao, but (as the case of Anita Dunn shows) they have plenty of admiration for Mao’s goals. Obama himself has criticized the U.S. Constitution for being merely a “charter of negative liberties” that fails to promote “redistributive change.”

This is the point: last November, the American people thought they were electing a “post-partisan,” “post-racial” President who would work to restore unity and self-confidence to the country. They woke up on November 5, however, to find that they had elected someone who was deeply ambivalent about America, who distrusted its founding principles of limited government, individual liberty, and local responsibility. Like his radical friends — Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, Anita Dunn — Barack Obama wishes to transform the United States according to a model whose basic shape was supplied by the utopian schemes of the 1960s. That’s why Anita Dunn said that Mao was one of the thinkers she most often turned to for wisdom about big-think political problems. It’s not that she admires his penchant for industrial strength homicide: rather, she admires his success at fomenting an egalitarian revolution. It’s not what we bargained for when we elected Barack Obama. But that’s what we’ve got. The question is how much worse will things have to get before the penny drops, before the scales fall from the collective eyes of the electorate? When will voters begin that long countermarch through the institutions in order to take back the country? If not now, when?”

Barack Obama wants to “spread the wealth” from one segment of society to another despite the “essential constraints” the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution. Some Americans want that to happen so I also have a question: “Are there enough voters willing to take back the country?”

The body of 75-year-old man sat decomposing on his Marina del Rey balcony for days because neighbors thought the lifeless figure was part of a Halloween display and didn’t call police.

Mostafa Mahmoud Zayed had apparently been dead since Monday with a single gunshot wound to one eye. He was slumped over a chair on the third-floor balcony of his apartment on Bora Bora Way, said cameraman Austin Raishbrook, who owns RMG News and was on the scene Thursday when authorities were alerted to the body.

Neighbors told Raishbrook that they noticed the body Monday “but didn’t bother calling authorities because it looked like a Halloween dummy,” he said.

I got some crime scene tape and body-outline chalk for Halloween. Maybe there’s someone I really dislike whom I can use to further accessorize the display. After all, if nobody is going to notice for three days . . .

P.S. I got the crime scene tape and body-outline chalk at the gift shop at the Coroner’s Office, in the company of a homicide detective. He said he had never drawn chalk around a body and his fellow cops would laugh at him if he ever tried it.

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